Constantinople Diagnosed with Vulnerability of Reentrancy attacks

The Ethereum based Constantinople hard fork faces wait as security susceptibility enabling reentrancy attack has been discovered by ChainSecurity (A smart contract audit firm) as reported on January 15. The company claims that this hard fork upgrade offers cheaper cost for gas (transaction fees) for some activities on the Ethereum network. As a side effect of that, Constantinople enables reentrancy attacks while using specific commands in ETH smart contracts.

With reentrancy susceptibility in Constantinople, it becomes possible for potential attackers to steal cryptocurrency from a smart contract by demanding funds on the network and feeding incorrect data about the attackers actual ETH balance. It was confirmed on Reddit by Afri Schoedon (release manager and ETH hard fork manager)that the primary developers of Ethereum are conscious of this vulnerability.

According to Schoedon, a call has been scheduled on January 19 involving all the core developers of this hard fork in order to decide on what is to be done next concerning the newly recognised loophole. He went on to state that ‘We will decide further steps on Friday in the all-core-devs call. For now, it will not happen this week. Stay tuned for instructions.’

It was in the middle of October last year when Constantinople was first confirmed on Ethereum public. The hard fork was intended to be activated smoothly on the main blockchain by the end of October-November 2108. However, the launch was held due to some technical glitches. Lane Rettig, the core developer of Ethereum in a statement to Bloomberg said that ‘I really can’t imagine a less contentious hard fork, to be honest. Of all the hard forks in the history of Ethereum, it’s probably the least eventful one.’

Previously, it was also reported that a few developers suggested that it would be a better option and less controversial to change the term hard fork to ‘update’. Reducing mining rewards from current 3 ETH to 2 would be the highlighted impact of the shift. Also, the downward arrangement could bring down volatility and inflation associated with miners selling ETH.

In November last year, stakes involved in carrying out hard forks were disseminated when BCH (Bitcoin Cash) community divided into two warring factions concerning a scheduled hard fork. Coinbase and Kraken are the latest crypto exchanges to have confirmed their support for Constantinople joining other supporters of the hard fork like Binance,Huobi and OKEx.

Moeen Khan is a Content Writer and Social Media Writer who actively writes about Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrencies at Coinpublish.
Moeen has previously worked with two start-up companies in New Delhi that were in the financial sector. He has interned with organizations like NDTV Goodtimes and Magicbricks (TOI Group). This experience has given him a broad knowledge base upon which he is working to build further through learning and practice.

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